A plan to give the British government power to override watchogs would raise "serious concerns" about the ability of regulators to oversee the City as a global financial centre, Bank of England Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. While Britain remains home to Europe's biggest financial sector after its exit from the European Union, banks are keen for regulators to help boost the City's global competitiveness.

Ireland's central bank is to ease mortgage-lending limits to allow first-time property buyers to borrow up to four times their income, in a move it said could help meet growing building costs but could also modestly push up prices, Reuters reported. The central bank introduced limits in 2015 capping how much banks can lend for the purchase of a home relative to its value and the borrower's income in a bid to prevent a repeat of excessive lending that devastated the economy over a decade ago.

Tens of thousands of French workers took to the streets Tuesday across the country, striking for pay hikes that keep up with rising inflation, the Associated Press reported. The industrial action came after weeks of walkouts that have hobbled French oil refineries and sparked gasoline shortages around the country. “It’s time to go back to work,” French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said Tuesday about people on strike in the French refineries of oil giant TotalEnergies.

The Bank of England on Tuesday said liability-driven investment funds were now better prepared to manage shocks like the one triggered by September's mini budget, and the risk of another "fire sale" dynamic in gilts had been significantly reduced, Reuters reported. "Taken as a whole, LDI funds are now significantly better prepared to manage shocks of this nature in the future," BoE Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe said in a letter parliament's Treasury Select Committee.

German prosecutors have searched the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in connection with an ongoing investigation of the multibillion-euro tax fraud scheme known as "cum-ex", Deutsche Bank said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Germany's largest lender is one of many banks that prosecutors have raided in connection with the tax scheme that thrived more than a decade ago.

Enel is discussing with a pool of Italian banks to secure a credit line, worth up to 16 billion euros ($15.7 billion) to support Italy's biggest utility, Reuters reported. The facility would have a 70% guarantee from Italy's credit export agency SACE under a state-guarantee scheme to help Italian companies affected by surging energy prices, source added. Read more.

Monte dei Paschi di Siena's management and Italian Treasury officials are ready to revive talks with potential buyers once the world's oldest bank completes a 2.5 billion euro ($2.46 billion) share sale next month, Reuters reported. Italy has years to cut the state's 64% stake in Monte dei Paschi (MPS) under a deal with the European Union, but the Treasury is not expected to sit idle for long. Rome failed to meet an initial EU deadline when talks to sell MPS to UniCredit collapsed a year ago.

Britain's new finance minister Jeremy Hunt scrapped Prime Minister Liz Truss's economic plan and scaled back her vast energy support scheme on Monday, making a historic policy U-turn to try to stem a dramatic loss of investor confidence, Reuters reported. Truss's spokesman denied that Hunt was running the country after his new strategy sent the pound soaring and helped government bond prices start to recover from the rout that followed her government's Sept. 23 plan for unfunded tax cuts.

The European Union will not pay out the vast majority of 75 billion euros ($73 billion) worth of development funds earmarked for Poland through 2027 unless Warsaw fixes the country's courts, a spokesman for the bloc's executive said on Monday, Reuters reported. Citing a flawed judiciary, the Brussels-based European Commission has already frozen some 35 billion euros assigned to Poland from a shared economic EU stimulus plan aimed at helping economies recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Italy's Monte dei Paschi di Siena launched on Monday a new share sale, its seventh in 14 years, seeking to raise up to 2.5 billion euros ($2.4 billion) to fund its latest turnaround plan, Reuters reported. MPS, which is owned by the state following a 2017 bailout, is offering shareholders 374 new shares for each three shares owned at a price of 2 euros each. On Friday, Italian market regulator Consob set the shares' reference price at 2.0630 euro each, stripping out a theoretical price for subscription rights of 7.8371 euros each.